Until the Last Ton

A panoramic historical account of India’s ascent in the global fossil economy

India is today one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of fossil fuels, driving new investments in the global fossil economy and achieving record-breaking levels of coal extraction at home. As the planet burns from the climate crisis, this entrenchment of fossil fuel dependency has left many wondering how we arrived at this point. Until the Last Ton provides a sweeping new appraisal of this planetary dilemma, uncovering how India became part of an emerging fossil capitalism that continues to shape the present.

Matthew Shutzer traces the origins of the country’s fossil economy to the early nineteenth century, when India’s coal-bearing lands in the forests of the Chotanagpur Plateau became frontiers of energy production under the British Empire. Investments in coal anchored global capital in this remote landscape, transforming the forest into the center of imperial overseas coal production across a century of colonial rule. Shutzer shows that at the heart of these shifts was a colonial legal framework of subterranean property, one that European firms and Indian landowners used to dispossess Indigenous cultivators living on the land, and which forged mining property through the progressive ecological destruction of this highland agrarian world.

Following these dynamics into the postcolonial period, Until the Last Ton reveals the enduring impacts of colonial property in the remaking of India’s fossil economy after empire, shedding new light on the rise of energy-intensive development in a postwar era defined by escalating crises of energy, capitalism, and the environment.